Read Me By Candlelight
by Lizzosaurus
Summary: They've known each other longer than they've known their own names... a vignette collection of moments shared between Lithuania and Belarus, warnings inside!


Rated for brief nudity, implicit depressive behavior and bloodletting, the ultimate medieval triad.

* * *

i.

She's so young the first time he carries her to bed. She's so young that he only needs to hold her with one arm - her head resting on his shoulder - while the other arm carries the animal-skin bag of manuscripts that had sent her into a dreamy repose next to the stove in the grand hall. She shifts and sighs and sinks into his chest, warm, smelling like soft sleep.

So young, and she could already read paper, she was already trying to make her own alphabet so Toris could learn how to read too - 'real words,' she said.

He reaches her chambers and the nurse opens the door, and he gently sets her down on her bed of soft furs.

And for a moment he sits there with her, a smile touching his lips as he drinks in her delicate, round child's face.

She's dribbled onto his shoulder but he doesn't mind.

-:-

ii.

The first time she asks for help doing a woman's work, he clears his throat and asks where her sestra is.

"She's in the fields where you sent her this morning."

"Why can't you bother the maids?"

"I don't like the maids."

So he sits on her bed, tucked up tight with perfumed linens now, and she turns around and teaches him how to unpin her plaits.

"Why are there so many ribbons?"

"They're prettier that way."

"I don't understand this braid pattern Nata."

"Just start at the bottom."

"Like this?"

"Yes, good."

He smiles at her patience, because at this age her tongue is barbed and fiery - quarrelsome enough to make the clergymen blanch when they cross her path.

She only listens to him and sestra.

Eventually her plaits fall apart beneath his fingers, into a gold-white mess that almost shimmers translucent in the candlelight.

"What now, Natashenka?"

Without a word she hands him her bristled, ivory hairbrush.

A birthday present.

It takes ages to brush away all the tangles - she was never one for sitting still and frequently interrupted to show him her studies or a pattern she'd drawn on her body with the quill ink. Her hair is long - falling down her back and well past the waist of her dress - and it clings to his arms like spiderwebs.

-:-

iii.

"I don't like the maids."

The second time she asks for help doing a woman's work, she has another idea in mind.

She wants him.

"I need help with my dress. The stitches are too tight."

And all the world's wisdom cannot keep him from obliging her.

The dresses are changing, restricting, shaping, and Natalya is nothing more than Poland's china doll to dress as he pleases. He cannot stop his partner from foisting French silk upon her in bolts, but he can help her take it off.

She points to the stitches that need ripped and he undoes them; she slides the sleeves away to reveal a crumpled chemise, and asks that he unlace the corset too.

He does.

She regathers her undone hair over one shoulder and looks back occasionally, because he's so close she can feel his breath hot on her back, he's so close that she can just see his furrowed brows when she strains her neck.

After some time unthreading he frees her from the trapping garment, and she lets the entire dress, heavy with unwanted decadence, fall to the floor.

The young womanly curves of her body are visible through the thin, linen shift.

She faces him again and he sees collarbones sharp against milky skin-

He unties the ribbon and her shift loosens, slides down one shoulder before she pushes it down the other.

Her breasts are small, soft yet firm in the autumn chill.

He closes his eyes and exhales - so close she gets gooseflesh from his presence.

One callused hand comes so much closer, to that pink flower petal tempting his fingers -

"I was needed some time ago in the stables."

And he leaves.

-:-

iv.

When they share each other's touch again, Toris is ill.

He's so ill he cannot stand, and none of the barber-surgeons are of any use to him; they only serve to weaken him further.

He closes his eyes and turns away as yet another new, strange man takes his arm and straightens it over the edge of the bed, palm up.

A bowl beneath, a blade above.

Red black hot.

Natalya strokes his hair and holds his free hand tight. They've let his blood so many times by now that the barber-surgeons are beginning to suspect a demon has possessed him.

With a pagan woman sitting at his head, there's little wonder as to the severity of the matter – only a demon could have driven him to commit such ungodly acts prior to his illness. Only a demon could have led him to the whorehouse on a quiet evening almost a fortnight ago, because when he came back he bathed for hours - madly scrubbing himself raw - and he sank into his bed drenched and naked, and he didn't rise again.

Now Toris is limp and exhausted. His eyes open again and he stares at the bed curtains with a glazed, empty stare.

Natalya knows better than to believe this is possession; his head is suffocating with a void, black hatred aimed at himself, and it's making him sick.

His eyes shift again, and this time he looks up at Natalya -

"I don't want to feel this way anymore."

"I know."

"I'm supposed to be so much more."

She brushes the backs of her fingers across his hot face.

"Lietuva."

When the barber-surgeon leaves, Natalya forces him to sit up and clear his lungs. She spreads out her own remedies on the bed, on his lap. He looks at her charts and scrolls and herbs and stones and she knows he's revelling in her intellect - he's been doing it for centuries.


End file.
